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RESTAURANTS; Mingling Is the Main Dish

COMMUNE is really a story of two restaurants. The first is Cena, Commune's predecessor -- a calm, even cerebral place, decorated in serene grays. The chef, Normand Laprise of the highly rated Tocque in Montreal, was self-effacing and prodigiously talented. The food won raves from virtually every critic who entered the place. Ordinary diners were scarce, however, and Cena closed its doors after a year.

Now comes Commune, which is everything Cena was not. It is loud. It is young. It is crowded. The food is just good enough to hold its own against the decor, but food is not really the main thing.

Commune was quite clearly engineered primarily as a social space, and it's hard to argue with the results. The doors opened, and a crowd rushed in, eager to take up a spot at the long communal table that runs nearly the length of the front room, or at the bar, with its illuminated onyx panel, or at the clever booths, with their blood-red acrylic tabletops, as lustrous as painted fingernails. The black-and-red decor is satanic in a strangely domestic way, with glowing red recesses at the tables that suggest a warm hearth.

Matthew Kenney is a moderately talented chef with immoderate ambitions. The success of his restaurant Matthew's, just north of Bloomingdale's, has spurred him to embark on an empire-building program. Matthew's begat Mezze, Cafe M and Canteen. With each new venture, the food seems to dwindle in importance. Commune, his latest, wobbles right on the cusp, good enough to justify one more restaurant but not good enough to add luster to his resume.

Like Canteen, Commune leans away a bit from the Mediterranean flavors and spices that dominated Mr. Kenney's earlier restaurants in favor of simpler, homier food. He still loves lemon. It pops up in the surprising spoonful of preserved-lemon puree alongside a hefty slab of hot-smoked salmon, and in a wonderful tartar sauce, creamy but sharp, that comes with two small crab cakes. Lime performs well, too, in an attractive appetizer of tuna tartare pressed on a bed of finely chopped cucumber and lightly touched with a lime-ginger dressing.

Warm shrimp pick up a good, smoky bite from their bacon wrappers, nicely accentuated by a small dollop of thick tomato and chili jam. Sweet-pea soup, however, has a sludgy consistency and precious little fresh-pea flavor. Ceviche of black bass with mango and green chili is out of register, dominated by mint and far too much citric acid. And Mr. Kenney drives right off the cliff with a very strange pizza of Parma ham and fontina cheese sweetened with white-truffle honey and balsamic vinegar. I have heard of breakfast pizza, but dessert pizza is new to me.

Many of the entrees suffer from the blahs. Steak au poivre, made with the absolute minimum of pepper, makes a decent-enough showing, but I found my attention wandering after the third bite. The main reason to order roasted rack of lamb is for the suave-textured Parmesan polenta, one of several featured side dishes, like truffled macaroni and cheese, that can be ordered on their own. Mussels taste fine until you reach the broth, saltier than the Dead Sea, and the garlic mayonnaise that comes with a crispy pile of pommes frites lacks body. Put a fry in it, and the fry tips over. Diver scallops in a lovely fricassee of fava beans, black trumpet mushrooms and asparagus also suffer from oversalting.

Saffron pasta with tender chunks of lobster poached in butter, rich and mildly exotic, has a whiff of distinction, enough to eclipse another pasta, an extraordinarily bland dish of orecchiette with fresh peas and fromage blanc.

Commune attracts a cosmopolitan-cocktail crowd at the bar and a wine-by-the-glass crowd at the tables. There's an admirably long, interesting wine list to serve this second audience, with one touch that I particularly like, the option of drinking a flight of three selected wines (red, white or rose) for $16. With spring finally in the air, no one should pass up the rose flight, a pink troika from Provence, southwestern France and the Jura.

A new dessert menu makes its debut this week, with the arrival of Alex Espiritu, formerly of Picholine and Bolivar, whose plans include American-accented desserts like rhubarb crisp with buttermilk sorbet and butterscotch cheesecake. The apple strudel, a glorious, raisin-filled ooze wrapped in a crunchy, sugary crust, is scheduled for a makeover. It will reappear as a beggar's purse. Keep your fingers crossed.

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Commune may come up short as a temple of fine cuisine, but for the moment it shows enormous vitality as a social gathering place. So vital, in fact, that the rear dining room has to be sealed off from the front room in the evenings by a black, semitransparent scrim. It is dark. So dark that sitting in the back room, I had to ask for extra candles so I could read the menu. Whether you are sitting in the front or the back, Commune is loud. So loud that even screaming across the table does no good. To appreciate the restaurant, it helps to be 25 and single. I'm not, but plenty of people are. I'll leave a little room for them.

Commune

*

[Rating: one star)

12 East 22nd Street, Flatiron district; (212) 777-2600.

ATMOSPHERE: A restaurant that feels like a nightclub, with a hyperactive bar scene and a communal table that feels like a bar. The food is global bistro, big on updated comfort foods.